Dir, Engineering

Responsibilities

• Own engineering execution across the Pathfinder product: delivery, quality, and technical accountability across all teams.
• Lead, develop, and hold accountable a set of engineering managers; build their capacity to run their teams independently.
• Drive org design decisions: team scope, composition, sequencing of team splits, and addition of new management capacity as the org grows.
• Balance engineering capacity across teams; make explicit prioritization calls when demand exceeds supply.
• Own the technical roadmap in partnership with the Pathfinder Product Manager.
• Engage at the architecture level with senior ICs—reviewing designs, providing guidance, and ensuring technical coherence across the platform.
• Supervise hiring across all Pathfinder engineering teams: set the bar, calibrate across managers, and close strong candidates.
• Partner with the VP of Engineering on org strategy, headcount planning, and cross-product engineering initiatives.
• Communicate clearly to senior leadership on progress, risks, and tradeoffs across the Pathfinder roadmap.
• Ensure engineering practices—security, quality, reliability, and operational discipline—meet the standards required for mission-critical deployments.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• 5+ years of engineering management experience, including at least 3 years managing other engineering managers.
• Track record of owning engineering execution across multiple teams simultaneously, with high quality and clear accountability.
• Architectural judgment to engage credibly with senior ICs: reviewing designs, identifying risks, and providing technical guidance across a complex, multi-layer stack.
• Experience owning org design decisions: team structure, scope boundaries, and how to sequence growth as headcount scales.
• Experience managing engineering organizations serving both cloud-hosted and on-premises or customer-controlled deployment environments.
• Experience partnering with product managers to translate operational requirements into technical roadmaps and delivery plans.
• Experience supervising hiring across multiple teams: setting the bar, calibrating across managers, and running a structured, high-signal process.
• Must be eligible to obtain a U.S. Government security clearance.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience in defense, intelligence, or national security technology environments.
• Led engineering organizations building operational platforms for government or mission-critical customers.
• Worked with graph databases or graph-based modeling for complex analytical problems.
• Led teams shipping enterprise features: multi-tenancy, RBAC, audit logging, or similar.
• Experience with secure development practices for government or controlled environments.
• Scaled an engineering organization through a rapid growth phase, including adding management layers.

Tech Environment

• React + TypeScript for user-facing applications and shared UI components
• Go (and sometimes Python) for backend services and integrations
• Neo4j and graph-based data modeling for core platform capabilities
• PostgreSQL, Terraform, Ansible, and infrastructure-as-code
• AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and observability tooling
• Customer private cloud deployment and on-site operational environments